"We're going to pass something that will undo 100 years of labor relations and there will be blood, there will be repercussions. We will relive the Battle of the Overpass," Democrat Douglas Geiss told his Michigan House colleagues in a floor speech before the final votes were taken on a pair of bills dealing with private- and public-sector unions.

The Battle of the Overpass was a 1937 clash between union organizers and a Ford Motor Co. security detail hired to obstruct their efforts. The three-hour melee resulted in numerous serious injuries, damaged Ford's public image and strengthened the union's hand.

It's to be hoped that Geiss is wrong about the bloodshed, though it will hardly be surprising if he's right.

Union leaders have vowed to oust legislators who voted to free workers from having to pay union dues -- thereby supporting a left-wing agenda with which those workers may disagree -- and they have every right to try.

But as they begin the effort to remake Michigan's legislature in their own image, they should bear in mind that no one was more responsible for Michigan's startling turn of events than the unionists themselves.

They panicked and they overreached.

Last month, while the rest of the nation was focused on the presidential election, Michigan's ballot included Proposal 2, a union-hatched initiative that would have made right-to-work laws unconstitutional. It got clobbered, 58 percent to 42 percent.

That opened the door for a Republican legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to pass a pair of laws that would have been laughed out of committee less than a decade ago.

If Michigan's Republicans can do so, they will have done a better job of explaining the benefits of worker freedom and the constraints of government budgetary reality to the voters than Ohio's Republican politicians did after passing Senate Bill 5 in 2010.

That's a pretty low bar, so maybe Michigan's lawmakers can pull it off. And if it does get physically ugly, it will be important for Snyder to act in ways that make it crystal clear that the thugs are the ones wearing the union label. Difficult, perhaps, for a man responsible for maintaining order, but probably not impossible.

Michigan is the second Midwestern state to make the intelligent leap into the right-to-work column within the last year. Traditionally more conservative, more Republican Indiana's conversion wasn't as earthshaking.

Ohio will get there someday, too, because of economic and political forces that will prove irresistible.

Michigan Rep. Geiss misses the point when he speaks of undoing 100 years of labor relations. What right-to-work laws actually offer is the chance to redo labor relations to fit an era that is most emphatically not 100 years ago.

Unionism is powerful, but it's also an anachronism. The general public does not share its interests and is increasingly aware of the social, political and economic damage that unionism's fight for survival is causing.

Two overreaches, two years apart: Republicans in Ohio pressed a case they weren't ready to make, but can make again whenever they choose. Unionists in Michigan lost bigger, when the voters declined to declare unions sacrosanct.

The game isn't over in either state, but a GOP legislator in Columbus had to wake up this morning feeling better about the future than a union boss in Lansing.

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